Nobody who visited New York or Washington in the aftermath of 9/11 will forget the shock and horror of that day. The crowds gathered across the United States to celebrate news of Osama bin Laden’s death have shown how deeply Americans still needed a catharsis nearly a decade after the September 11 attacks. But even as revelers in New York and Washington flaunted their flags and chanted “USA! USA!” it was clear that the strangely named Operation Neptune’s Spear has raised questions the Obama administration may prefer to leave unanswered. With the president’s approval ratings surging few citizens will worry about the dubious legality of covert raids in foreign sovereign territory, but Neptune’s Spear will have serious implications well beyond the search for Al-Qaeda suspects, several dozen of whom are still thought to be hiding in other parts of Pakistan.
The conclusion of the search for bin Laden has reignited a debate about torture. Many Americans have forgotten but will now, to some extent, relive the heady political atmosphere in which the New York Times adopted the Orwellian lexicon of the Bush White House rather than admit the government had facilitated torture, at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.
Figleaf phrases like “enhanced interrogation techniques” hid the distasteful realities of the war on terror, as did legal casuistry about the “specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering” when these techniques were deployed. One infamous memo concluded that “although the waterboard constitutes a threat of imminent death” it would not in isolation violate torture statutes unless repeated episodes of simulated drowning resulted in “prolonged mental harm.”
In the wake of bin Laden’s killing, suggestions that “harsh interrogations” may have provided vital clues to his whereabouts have opened the door to further sophistry and revisionism.
Even if these interrogations were helpful, they were hardly a magic bullet. The search for bin Laden drew on a wide variety of old-fashioned detective work. Tip-offs from years of interrogation – most if not all of it acquired without torture – enabled the National Security Agency (NSA) to monitor emails and phone calls that helped the CIA track bin Laden’s trusted courier to Pakistan. Patient surveillance by agents on the ground eventually led to the compound in Abbottabad, but even then it was only after satellites had monitored the compound for months that Obama’s senior advisors were prepared to countenance a covert raid.
Beyond the ethics of intelligence gathering, Operation Neptune’s Spear establishes a troublesome precedent for other countries engaged in less-storied wars on terror. If, for example, India were to embark on unauthorized raids inside Pakistan, to pursue its own terror suspects, on what grounds could the US object? Then there is the question of what other embarrassing alliances the US has made during its search for Al-Qaeda.
Billions of dollars were squandered on Pakistan, despite ample evidence that parts of its notorious intelligence agency, the ISI, remained sympathetic to bin Laden and his cause. President Obama, no doubt wisely, chose not to alert the government of Pakistan before his elite forces launched their raid. This is hardly surprising given that the compound in Abbottabad was within walking distance of an elite military academy. How could bin Laden have lived there without some protection from senior members of the country’s military and political elite?
The emerging details of bin Laden’s final moments also raise serious questions about whether there was ever a genuine effort to capture him.
Gratifying as it may be to US public opinion, the summary killing of an enemy leader runs counter to well-established precedents in the search for justice after war crimes and other atrocities. Despite the undeniable complexity of bringing a captured bin Laden to trial, the US would have ultimately been better served by doing so.
After the Holocaust the state of Israel made a difficult philosophical decision to try perpetrators of the Final Solution, like Eichmann, in courts of law rather than dispatch them in covert operations — which could have been done far more easily.
Furthermore, Israel’s abandonment of these high principles, most notably in its targeted killings of Palestinian terror suspects, has harmed its reputation while doing little to improve security.
Every war offers observers temptations to moral superiority. Osama bin Laden’s cold-blooded embrace of violence against innocent civilians – in Africa, Europe and Asia as well as New York – makes him a convenient symbol of all that is hateful in the world. Even so, his ability to distort parts of America’s national character has been disturbingly profound. Reflecting on the jingoism which greeted news of bin Laden’s killing, the American columnist David Sirota has observed that “in the years since 9/11, we have begun vaguely mimicking those we say we despise, sometimes celebrating bloodshed against those we see as Bad Guys just as vigorously as our enemies celebrate bloodshed against innocent Americans they (wrongly) deem as Bad Guys. Indeed, an America that once carefully refrained from flaunting gruesome pictures of our victims [now] rejoices over images of Saddam
Hussein’s hanging and throws a party at news that bin Laden was shot in the head.” Only when the country finds its way back from these regrettable aberrations, can it truly claim to have extinguished the dreadful legacy of Osama bin Laden.
